Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (20 page)

“No.” The plump woman shook her head so that the amethysts flashed in the silk of her shawl. “He thinks he hated me before, but I made him love me. He’s only a boy—I know what his needs are, better than those callow hussies… Better than he does himself. He needs
me
, though his pride won’t let him admit it… And in any case, what he thinks doesn’t matter. If I can bear his son, he’ll not be able to have me put aside.”

Tally’s head turned sharply; Rhion heard the catch of her breath. “Did he say that?”

“Of course he did,” Damson snapped, not looking back over her shoulder at her sister, keeping her eyes on the two wizards before her like a duellist watching circling foes. “Why do you think I agreed to this in the first place? I can’t let him go—
I won’t let him go!
He’s
mine
. I’ll be whatever he wants me to be—he’ll see that, once I’ve got him back.”

“If this is true,” Rhion explained patiently, “it won’t be because of the philter. If what you say is true, he may very well go on loving you afterward—or he may not. A spell such as the one I’ll weave for you has only a limited, and a very specific, action, namely, a surge of unreasoning desire for you so powerful it would take an extremely strong-willed man to resist. But it cannot affect what he will feel about this desire, or about you, once its effect has passed.”

“But it
will
bring him to my bed?”

Rhion sighed. He sometimes wondered why he bothered with the warning—they almost never listened. Inevitably they brushed it aside with,
But
it WILL work, won’t it?

“Unless he’s a very strong-willed man, or unless he has some kind of counterspell from a stronger wizard than I… Yes.”

“That is enough, then.” She sat back a little and there was a self-satisfied note in her crisp, high-pitched voice. “It’s all that matters. I’ll make him need me, once I’m past his silly pride—once he sees that he
does
need me. It’s only his pride that makes him spiteful, anyway.”

Rhion was silent. Loving and hating were so close, two sides of a coin whose name was Need. He wondered if Esrex’ hate and cruelty had been weapons of defense rather than offense, a final bastion to protect himself, not only against the demands of the daughter of his enemy, but against his own lust for one whose family had already taken away from him all that he had. In that case the breaking of this last bastion of his personal integrity wasn’t likely to make him any more pleasant…

But he didn’t know and he couldn’t know. And, as Jaldis had said, it was none of his business to judge.

For a moment he smelled sawdust and stale beer and looked again into cowlike brown eyes above a sequined veil; and behind the woman at the Black Pig he saw clustered like a spectral regiment all those other encounters in darkened kitchens and inn parlors and the faces of every other man or woman who’d ever asked him to use his powers to get them between somebody else’s sheets.

It all had so little to do with magic, with what magic actually was.

And Tally had asked for his help.

He held out his hand for hers. “As you wish, my lady.”

“One other thing…” Her hand held back from his, as if fearing to touch. It was a very round, delicate little hand, all four stubby fingers and the thumb tightly ringed in elaborate confections of opal, ruby, and pearl whose design could have been recognized like a signature. “Another tincture, or powder, or spell that will guarantee that I conceive and bear a son.”

In for a lamb, in for a sheep… Somebody might as well get some good out of this…

Again, Rhion inclined his head.

Of the two spells, the love-philter was by far the easiest. Rhion heaped the standard base-powder on Damson’s scented hand, then feathered it onto the shirt which had been laid down like a table-cloth for him to work on, and around them wove the circles of power and need. The Gray Lady had taught him many variant spells of this kind, different mixes of ingredients, and he’d calculated which to use tonight to take into account the phase of the moon—which was four days past the third quarter—and the position of the rising stars. Having observed Damson in the crystal he knew what she looked like and was able to weave into the spells a specific hunger for that plump white body and no other, a thirst unquenchable save by the scent of her mouse-brown hair. Esrex was young, Tally had said, barely twenty—impecunious, unpleasant, bitter, and proud, but male and young. With them, he wove spells of luck and hope and the image of Damson in her husband Esrex’ arms.

Jaldis, in silence save for a little cracked humming in his broken throat, wove the stronger geas, the more difficult one, a spell of conception, and, more importantly, to prevent miscarriage, accident, or the spontaneous shedding of the child in the first few fragile weeks. They had guessed that Damson would request such a tincture and had come prepared for it, remembering that she had miscarried at least one child already. With luck, the Duke’s elder daughter would be able to keep her husband returning to her bed for several weeks. Unless the young man himself had become sterile, that should suffice.

And during the whole proceedings, Damson sat with her plump hands folded, the steel grip of her will almost palpable in the leaden gloom. She would have that young man, bring him to heel from his spiteful strayings! Now and then the jewels on her fingers would flash as they tightened, her protuberant gray eyes would shift behind the eyeholes of the silver mask. She was wondering, Rhion supposed, whether either of the wizards she’d hired would guess who she really was.

Only after Damson had gone, leaving behind her a fat pouch of coin, and Tally was leading them down the stairs to the postern gate once more, did Rhion relax, pulling the mask off and shaking the sweat out of his tousled brown curls, and putting his spectacles back on.

“That was well done,” Jaldis murmured softly, his arthritic grip tight upon Rhion’s sleeve. The night had turned cold, as spring nights did in these dry highlands; the smells of lotus and jasmine from the Duke’s vast water gardens breathed through the window lattices, like subtle colors in the creamy dark. “As good a love-spell as any I ever cast.”

“Great.” Rhion sighed, and flexed the crick from his chubby fingers. “Just the reputation I always sought. The pimp’s delight, provided my clients’ husbands don’t kill me.” The memory of all those other love-spells, the sour sense of having prostituted himself, still clung like the redolent musk of Damson’s perfume. “Why do they call them love-spells, anyway?” he added bitterly. “It isn’t love, you know.”

“Maybe because some people can’t tell the difference.”
Tally slid back the postern bolts, and stood her candle in the near-by niche of the little gate god to open the door. “Or if they suspect there’s a difference, they don’t want to know.”

In the candle’s reflected light her gray eyes were troubled and sad. Without his spectacles, he wouldn’t have been able to see her face during the conjuration, even had she not been masked; now he saw that she had been thinking about what she’d been watching. She’d gotten what she’d gone after—all of her life, he guessed, she had been Damson’s champion: riding into the woods to save her child; seeking out what means she could to alleviate her heartbreak at Esrex’ cruelty; and submerging her own thoughts in the necessity of fixing her sister’s life. Clearly the steely self-will of Damson’s words had troubled her deeply.

In her face, as she looked mutely at him in the shadows of the gateway, were questions deeper than could be asked here on the threshold of departure, the questions of a girl who has begun to realize that love was not what she thought it was, and magic was not what she thought it was… perhaps nothing was what she thought it was.

“Or maybe,” she added, nearly inaudibly, “they think it really
is
love. Rhion…” There was sudden pleading in her voice for reassurance, for forgiveness, and for help against a revelation she would rather not have seen.

He couldn’t answer. More than anything in the world he wanted to go somewhere quiet with her, talk to her, and share with her what he had seen of the muddled affairs of the human heart—and to have her reassurance against his own bitter confusion of mind. To get to know her.

But it was out of the question.

Their eyes held. The silence rang palpable as a tapped chime.

Then, aware that it was madness—cruelty to her and stupidity of the most suicidal kind to him—he left Jaldis leaning upon his staff, and gently taking Tally’s hands, brushed her lips with his.

Her fingers crushed desperately over his, trembling and urgent, and for an instant he felt not only her body, but her spirit sway toward his, like a young almond tree in the wind’s embrace. In the limpid glow of the candle, he saw tears silver her eyes; in the eyes themselves, dilate with the night, he saw the reflection of his own desire, his own knowledge that this should never be.

It should end here
, he thought, with what little sanity was left to him.
In all propriety—in all sanity—we should never meet again
.

But he knew even then that they would.

Turning quickly she fled from him, brushing past Jaldis and vanishing up the stairs in a swirl of black fustian and a shuddering smoke-stream of tawny unhooded hair.

Quietly Rhion closed the postern gate behind them and used his spells to shoot the bolt on the palace side. Taking Jaldis’ arm, he led the way back down the alley, making once more for their rooms in the Old
Town.

If he had still been the only son of the banking house of Drethet, he thought, guiding Jaldis carefully along the wall where the pavement was unbroken and the footing better, he could have said,
Can I meet you one day in the marshes to go hawking?
He could have put on a mask of red leather and pheasant feathers and ridden in his sedan chair up to the palace on carnival night, to dance with her at least. He guessed she was a good dancer, as he himself had been once upon a time. He could have heard her voice, if nothing else; touched her hand… Gone to the market to buy the finest porcelain flute purchasable, or a scatterbrained red hunter pup that would please her…

Academically he had known when he made the decision to become Jaldis’ pupil what he was giving up. His family—the love he bore for his sister and his friends—all rights under law, among them the right to marry and by implication the right to fall in love with honest women, let alone the daughters of Dukes. And his blood, the blood of a wizard born, did not question the decision.

After a long time Jaldis’ sweet, thready voice, still muffled by the cloak, broke the silence. “There is enough silver in the bag she gave us,” it said quietly, “to allow you to get drunk, you know.”

Rhion sighed. He had never spoken to Jaldis about Tallisett, but it did not surprise him that the old man had guessed. “I’d only have to sober up again,” he said resignedly. “I might as well stay…”

From somewhere off to their right—an alley, a doorway, a window, a balcony—came the vicious slap of a crossbow firing. Something sliced at the back of Rhion’s neck, not even hurting in that first shocked second. In his grip Jaldis’ body jarred and sagged, and turning his head Rhion saw, with a kind of numbed immobility of thought, a small arrow standing in his master’s shoulder, blood welling forth stickily and copiously under the cloak.

Without thinking he ducked, dragging them both back as a second bolt slammed into the marbly stucco of the palace wall which had showed up their forms so clearly in the dark. Metal glinted in the shadows of a second-storey porch across the alley. In darkness that would have hidden them from other eyes, he saw a man and a woman, street-warriors, thugs by their dress, dodge back out of sight, crossbows and arrows in their hands. At the same moment half a dozen ruffians burst from the doorway beneath the balcony’s shadow.

“Ambush!”
Rhion yelled, and flung the first illusion he could call to mind—that hackneyed old stand-by, an exploding ball of fire—at their pursuers, and, flinging one arm bodily around Jaldis, staff and all, took to his heels.

He knew the arrow was poisoned.
Pheelas-
root would temporarily rob or weaken a wizard’s power while leaving the rest of his mind clear, but it was expensive and hard to get. Most assassins contented themselves with cheaper alternatives, either a heavy soporific like toadwort or poppy or an outright, fast-acting poison like datura. If the poison didn’t kill the wizard quickly, at least most of his concentration—if he were still conscious at all—would go into counteracting the deadly effects, leaving the assassins free to continue the assault with swords, ax-handles, chains, or whatever other hardware came to hand.

All this flashed through Rhion’s mind in seconds as he half-dragged, half-carried Jaldis toward the refuge of the nearest alley.
I can’t let them corner me
…

He collected his mind enough to fling behind him a spell of faulty aim and another one, a second later, of mechanical failure, though he was fairly certain the crossbows had been counterspelled… a suspicion which was confirmed by the bolt that splintered against the corner of the alley wall as he ducked around it.

Jaldis stumbled and slumped, and Rhion felt the last consciousness go out of the old man. He thrust him behind him into the shadows of a porch and caught up his staff, turning in time to strike aside the jab of the nearest sword. His father had never believed in weaponry training for the sons of the merchant class, and Rhion had been far too lazy, and far too much of a dandy, to oppose him in this opinion. It was Shavus the Archmage who, during his first year with Jaldis, had beaten into him the rudiments of self-defense. He swept the sword-thrust aside and reversed the staff to jab and sweep at the man coming at him from the other direction, straddling Jaldis’ fallen body and trying frantically to call to mind some spell—any spell—to help him.

But it takes a trained warrior to fight unthinkingly. Backed almost to the wall, slashing with his stick at the five swords which surrounded him in a hedge of steel, Rhion could call few options to mind. A wall of fire in the circumstances wouldn’t work—they were too close—and with Jaldis down an explosion of white light would not buy him enough time to get the old man on his feet and drag him away.